Travel Guitar Plans

Autobiography 2

I conceived of the autobiography as sort of a joke. I was only 32, but feeling like I had exhausted all my options. In retrospect it seems more like a failure of imagination. I wanted to stamp my life story into sheets of metal. I had purchased letter stamps in two sizes, and got some nice thick aluminum sheet from a heating and air conditioning shop. I started to work.

Stamping words into metal was a bit tedious. Instead of the story of my life, I made a list of words. Words that recurred in my mind. I had a robust habit of thinking and worrying, a running dialog in my head. I had tried to stop it with various techniques, but it remained, a powerful river of introspective chatter. Always rejustifying a happy ending to what looked like an endless downward spiral. I’m doing it again here.

Dreams at night continued the epic in unconscious form, often more pleasant, accompanied by bizarre and colorful imagery. After the words were stamped into the metal sheet, I painted over them with representations of some dreams and visions.

The fact remained that I was an introspective loner, enjoying solitude mostly out of fear and irritation with other people.

I went to Telluride Bluegrass Festival with my coworker. I got sick and came home, then expanded on an idea I’d had there. I wrote a story of my life, with my childhood night terrors as the pivotal clue.

I wrote a happy ending, but it was only the beginning. I had an idea for a sequel, based on the idea that there is an actual physical “place to go” in dreams. Similar to Carlos Castaneda’s ideas. Lucid dreaming. But I had little success becoming lucid in dreams. I felt there was no “place” for me there, just as there seemed to be no place for me in the world. I was pretty much just anxious, fearful and depressed, with no idea how to deal with it. I muddled along.

The actual process of writing the words, first on metal, then on paper, then on a computer screen, was the thing that changed my life in an unexpected way.

After the metal stamping project, I wrote ten pages with a pencil, as fast as I could before the idea left me. This was where the link with the nightmares was made.
I edited and rewrote it with a ballpoint pen, then typed it on my old manual typewriter. It kept getting longer. I borrowed a whirring electric typewriter from my dad. Then I rented an IBM Selectric at Kinko’s for $12.95 per hour. I used whiteout and retyped over it. I couldn’t stop editing. A friend told me about his text editing typewriter with a four line screen. I started to investigate, went to Office Depot and bought my first computer on August 6, 1992, the 47th anniversary of the Hiroshima nuclear bombing of civilians. I couldn’t figure out how to work it. There were no instructions. I returned it to the store, but the other customers wanted it so badly I realized it must be worth more than I had paid. I took it home again, on my bicycle. That night, in a magical moment on the phone with Spencer, I learned how to open a text file in DOS editor. I learned about menus. It was like learning about the library as a child. Who needs school? Who needs other people? All I needed was books, and now all I need is the machine!

Eventually I ended up feeling really bad about how I treated Spencer. Not that I really treated him very badly. I just treated him like I treated everyone else: like a machine. It was mostly a case of neglect. Machines didn’t mind so much, people did. I tried to be more like a machine. I tried not to mind when people did it to me, with limited success.

The purchase of a real computer changed my life. I imagined the sequel to my autobiography over and over. The inside of a text file seemed to me like a “place” equal to my idea of a place in dreams. A couple of years later, the internet and world wide web seemed like a natural evolution of that promised place, a true “place for everyone”, especially for introspective loners.

In my dream, the internet is a long stick of yellow chalk, just below the surface of the sandy ground. It is a revelation. We can ride it to fantastic places, anywhere in the universe.

In 1994, Spencer showed me a search engine. Everything was text, no images. The first web page I viewed was by a young woman, she titled it “Why the Web Sucks.” I forget why it sucked in her opinion. I wonder what she thinks of it now. She’s probably a millionaire. Another way that I failed.